It has been precisely five months since I filed an RTI application with the Advertisement department of Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) seeking information about legal and illegal advertisement hoardings in the city. (If you haven’t read the first piece you can read it here). And today as I write this second post about the status of my application, I stand in dismay, even as I continue to struggle to get the information that I am looking for.

In the last five months as I ran around pursuing this RTI application, there have been times when I sat counting the days and hours I spent on this chase. I would ask myself, “is it all worth it? What am I going to get at the end of it?” May be after months of prolonged wait, even if I succeed to get the information, it might just turn out to be obsolete. But then if I stop following it up, I for sure know, the lethargic city corporation officers who shifted their responsibility and did their best to wash their hands off, will continue doing the same in future. –Read more

At DataMeet we have spent years looking for and trying to make data accessible. The last few years more and more data is being made public which we are excited about however people demand data that fills the gaps in data that already exists or that is more actionable. Data that people want and need isn’t being produced, and if it is being produced it isn’t being shared.

This is the most true in urban spaces where there are tons of projects dedicated to collecting data for the city but none of this data enters the public domain as open data. It isn’t public data because the government doesn’t collect it and the various governance and civic oriented groups who collect the data are more prone to write reports or put the analyzed data up online and not the usable and complete raw data.

So DataMeet along with Oorvani Foundation and Mapunity want to start a monthly Data Party! Where we pick a topic and try to collect as much data as we can over a month. Then we will make the data open for download on OpenCity Urban data portal and also send it to the appropriate person in the government, as well as, write data stories on Citizen Matters.

Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) has recently launched its Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) in May’16. First announced in 2013, this was one of the systems most data enthusiasts in urban transport were eagerly waiting for. The system was designed to scale on paper and BMTC made sure the data rights of data being generated are with them instead of the contractor. Even with extreme planning, the system was delayed by 2 years and has several issues with it. Some of these issues have been highlighted to BMTC by members of datameet’s transport working group with suggestions to make it better in early June. Along with the suggestions we had several questions regarding the project, we have asked BMTC to help us understand the ITS system in a better way and expressed interest to be part of the Evaluation & Monitoring (E&M) of the ITS project. It is important that the project is closely monitored to improve public transportation for Bengaluru.

We also shared some of the previous work carried out by members of the group and suggestions to use open transport standards like GTFS, usage of openstreetmap data to reduce maintenance costs for currently using third party services like Google Maps which is not entirely free.

Members of datameet have been working on transport data of BMTC since 2010. Thejesh GN hosts static data of routes and schedules of various years through his project OpenBangalore. As a community of researchers, data users and enthusiasts we have been studying and experimenting with the evolution of data practices in India. Open Data is helping us be aware of our surroundings and also contribute back to the city in our own way. BMTC’s ITS implementation is a opportunity for most of us, we can potentially use GPS data to understand traffic patterns, rash driving of bus drivers, skipping of bus stops and trips. The ITS system will help the commuters more than ever if being utilized the right way. Open Data can help make this dream a reality by letting any commuter analyze his ride. Officials of BMTC has made announcements of bringing up a data sharing policy on the lines of National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy (NDSAP). In this regard we requested them to host a public consultation for their draft data sharing policy. We hope we can help BMTC and Bengaluru in a better way by bringing a policy suitable for all commuters and not just data users.

REGISTER TODAY! We have reached capacity but have left it open for today. If you are not registered you won’t be able to join as Google security is very strict and will require you to be on a list.

Day 1: Pollution Party!

9:00am – 10:00am

Registration

10:00am – 10:15am

Introduction to OpenDataCamp
Team DataMeet

10:15am – 10.55am

Karnataka State Pollution Control Board
By Dr Nagappa, Scientific Officer

11:00am – 11:10am

Tea Break

11:15am – 12.00PM

Environmental Support Group

12:00pm – 01.00PM

Water Dr. Priyanka Jamwal
Environmental Researcher who currently is a fellow in ATREE. Her work focuses on identification of contaminant sources in surface water bodies, modeling the fate and transport of contaminants in urban hydrological systems and assessing the risk to human health due to exposure to contaminants.

Getting to 12 PM 2.5 | Setting the context for Action!
Sensing Local is a Bengaluru based do-tank focused towards making cities healthier, safer and more inclusive. The studio is working in partnership with Anti Pollution Drive (APD) Foundation, Mangalore towards a collaborative project on tackling air pollution. (https://sensinglocal.wordpress.com/

03:45PM – 04:45PM

Urban Emissions
By Sarath Guttikunda

04:45PM – 05.30PM

Group conversation and planning session on response to Geospatial Information Regulation Bill 2016
By Volunteers of SaveTheMap.in

Sponsors

DataMeet will be hosting the 5th Bangalore Open Data Camp: Pollution Party on May 14th and 15th. This year we want to spend time and look at the growing problem of pollution by spending two days examining the role of data. Last year saw a major turning point in the debate around pollution. Indian cities became a major focal point, as proof that New Delhi has worse air quality than reigning champion Beijing was proven with data. This put a spotlight on air pollution problem across India. At the same time water pollution from industry has also come up in the foaming lakes and rap videos fighting for recognition of pollution and its effects on people. The economic and development growth has meant that the building industry has been in over drive bringing sand and dust into urban and peri urban areas in large quantities plus the growing lack of proper trash disposal has had major health implications for people from all social economic backgrounds.

However, the actual exposure of pathogens and pollution is not well known, extensive data has not been made available or is being collected in a way that can’t be easily understood or acted upon. This has spurred the rise of data collection networks and agencies to fill this gap. In every major city citizen supported cheap sensor devices have been put around cities to add data to the small number of official government monitoring stations.

This year at Open Data Camp we want to explore the role of these data collection network in a growing citizen and private sector monitoring role. What is the role of open data? When these networks grow can there be agreement on standards and formats to be maintained? and Are there financially sustainable solutions that can be built on open data?

We’d like to thank our sponsors Google, Sensor without Boards, India Open Data Association, Oorvani Foundation, and partner Reap Benefit. If you would like to sponsor or get involved please contact me @ Nisha (at) Datameet.org

Open Access Week is used as an opportunity to spread awareness of open access issues throughout the world. It was Oct 24th to the 30th last year. Shravan and Mahroof from the Ahmedabad Chapter suggested we do the first every multi city hangout and bring together different groups working on openness issues throughout the country.

Data.Gov.In started us off with Alka Misra and Sitansu participating from Delhi. They spoke about new features on Data.Gov.in, new datasets and visualizations available. They were also there to extend invites for more participation from the community.

Rahmanuddin from Access to Knowledge then spoke about Wikipedia and their community dedicated to local language knowledge sharing. They also had pertinent questions to Data.Gov.In regarding using open licenses. Since Wikipedia can’t use any data from Data.Gov.In since a license isn’t specified.

Ahmedabad Chapter went next. Ramya Bhatt, Assistant Municipal Commissioner from Ahmedabad, came and gave a brief talk about their plans for open data and smart cities. Alka from Data.Gov.In offered assistance. Then some students from Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Technology’s machine learning program used some data from Data.Gov.in to do analysis at the event. They looked at high budget allocation per state and drop out rates.

Open Access India’s Sridhar Gutam briefly went through the plans OAI has for the upcoming year to promote open access science and journals.

Hyderabad DataMeet is a new and yet to really take shape meet up but we were happy to see a first attempt. Sailendra took the lead as the organizer and brought together some people from IIM Hyderabad. Srinivas Kodali was there to talk about all the data he had made available that week.

Banalore DataMeet was there to share what has been going on with DataMeet and any new iniatives in Open Access

It was a great event, and as with all online events there were some technical difficulties but everyone was patient. It was awesome to see how the open culture space has grown, and to see so many new DataMeet chapters.

Open Bangalore has been a pioneer in opening up several data sets that help understand Bangalore city. This includes the network of Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC). The BMTC operates over 2000 routes in the city and region of Bangalore and is the only real mode of public transit system in the city. Some of us at DataMeet took to time understand its network better by performing some basic analysis on the gathered dataset. The data set had bus stops, routes and trips. We inspected frequency, coverage, redundancy and reachability.

Longest route

BMTC is known for its many long routes. Route 600 is the longest, making a roundtrip around the city, covering 117 km in about 5 hours. There are 5 trips a day, and these buses are packed throughout. It should be noted that while the route traces the edges of the city in the west and north, it encircles the larger industrial clusters of the east and south.

Frequency

Next, I wanted to look at the frequency of different routes. In the image below, stroke thickness indicates how many trips each route makes. The relationship of the bus terminals with neighbourhoods and the road network can be easily observed. For instance, the north and west of the city have fewer, but more frequent routes. Whereas, the south has more routes with less frequency. Also, nodes in the north and west seem to rely more on the trunk roads than the diversely-connected nodes in the south. One can easily trace the Outer Ring Road, too.

Reachability

I tried to define reachability as destinations one can get to from a stop without transferring to another bus. The BMTC network operates long and direct routes. The map shows straight lines between bus stops that are connected by a single route. The furthest you can get is from Krishnarajendra Market (KR Market) to the eastward town of Biskuru: roughly 49 km as the crow flies.

Redundancy

Tejas and I took turns to try and figure out the redundancy within the network. Redundancy is good to absorb an over spill of bus commuters. Redundancy is a drain on resources and makes it hard to manage such a vast network with efficiency. So, we looked at segments that overlapped different bus routes.

The July edition of GeoBLR featured Rahul RS from Onze Technologies. Onze is the prefered store locator infrastructure by several businesses in India including TVS, Dell and Cafe Coffee Day. The store locator is powered by Onze’s very own Latlong.in – extensive, web based points of interest and map data interface.

Rahul shared the story of Latlong.in, their infrastructure and challenges mapping Indian cities. They started out in 2007 at a time when there was no reasonable geographic data source available for India – commercial and non-commercial. Rahul’s team gathered toposheets from the Survey of India and georeferenced boundaries to incorporate into their maps. Rahul pointed out that these are inexpensive but high effort tasks. Plus, tools to do these are expensive.

In order to address India-specific mapping needs, geo-rectification needed to be inevitably supported by field surveys. Each city is unique and people entirely depend on landmarks and hyperlocal information to get around. Rahul brought in experts from different areas to gather local information. “The idea behind Latlong.in starts by saying that addresses don’t work in India”, says Rahul. When OpenStreetMap picked up, Latlong.in moved to a mix of their data and OSM that was maintained on their own. It is a complicated effort. Conflation and dealing with multiple revisions of data is tricky and there aren’t great tools to deal with it effortlessly. Latlong.in follows Survey of India’s National Map Policy. They avoid mapping defence and high security features.

Owning the entire data experience is critical to win in this market. Remaining open and improving continuously is the only way to keep your datasets upto date.